Source
- URL: https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2068004322013569443
- Author: Taelin (@VictorTaelin)
- Posted: 2026-06-19 16:13:46
Thread
1/ @VictorTaelin
humans are just so confused about everything, we invent layers of complexity on top of a simple underlying reality, assign different names to the same fundamental concepts, spawn entire fields to investigate the same mathematical objects under different grammatical names
2/ @comohology
@VictorTaelin
Can you give an example of this in mathematics? I don’t think what you say is true.
3/ @VictorTaelin
what I wrote isn’t just true, it is how humanity operates
if we weren’t so eager to name concepts in a way that appeals to our evolved meat brain intuitions, we could probably compress and unify our whole body of mathematical knowledge into a tiny fraction of its current length
what sparkled this specific tweet was a conversation about SupGen, where someone had an a-ha moment when I told them that synthesizing a proof to a formal statement is the same procedure as finding the solution to a set of equations.
researchers arbitrarily decided to give many different names to that:
- inductive program synthesis
- symbolic regression
- automated theorem proving
- constraint satisfaction
- type inhabitation
- higher order unification
all these are literally the same thing, per curry-howard’s isomorphism.
and beyond just using different names, we also study these things as completely separate fields. for example, if you search the literature, you’ll find most papers on program synthesis implement a solution that crafts programs given test equations, but not proofs. and papers on ATP implement a solution to finding proofs given theorems, but not programs. and they use different jargon, find the same problems, gravitate the same solution in full separation.
EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE WORKING IN THE SAME PROBLEM
this goes beyond programs/proofs, it happens everywhere. another example is how linearity is the obvious solution to implementing functional runtime with O(1) mutable buffers, and free of garbage collection, and massively parallel, and a thousand of other things. but we work on each of these “desired features” as separate problems even though they’re all symptoms of the same underlying disease: human intuition biased towards thinking that sharing variables is “free”
it is just how we work, and it is depressing
Branches: 2026-06-19-ashrealite-what-i-wrote-isnt-just-true-it-is-how-humanity, 2026-06-19-0xsakanade-isnt-it-great-that-ai-understands-our-human, 2026-06-19-Johnny2Fingersz-what-i-wrote-isnt-just-true-you-are-correct-that, 2026-06-19-fluxlesss-imo-representations-matter-while-their, 2026-06-19-Ed__dev-this-pattern-appeared-so-often-that-in-2017-19-i, 2026-06-20-Cypoe_-yeah-wouldnt-it-be-lovely-to-view-any-and-all